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Frank Believes
The key to success is balance. It's been said over and over again for a reason. As far as I’m concerned, there are four main things in prioritized order that you need to balance:
1. Studying.
The main reason you're at university to begin with.
This in itself is a complicated enough task. For starters, who really wants to study? It’s long, boring and mentally exhausting.. but it does need to be done. There are a few tricks that could help your overall success.
The courses you have vary in difficulty, both in the way they are designed and in the specific strengths that you may or may not have. I personally found the Materials course to be the hardest in first year, whereas pretty much all my friends thought it was more or less a breeze. The sooner you figure out which courses you think you’ll have more trouble in, the sooner you can assign more study time to it.
Another trick is to figure out when and where you study most efficiently. Some people like to wake up at the crack of dawn and go to the library. Others prefer to be alone in their room late at night. Learning how you study best is extremely important and could be the deciding study related factor in your success.
2. Sleep.
Sleep is the hardest one to juggle when project and crunch time happen. For projects, there is a pretty straight forward balancing choice that you need to make. Are the extra marks you’ll get by doing more of the project / finishing the project worth the agony of staying up extremely late / all night? If you’re extremely on the ball, you may never have to make that choice. I’ve met about 4 people total over the years who haven’t.
Making the choice for exams is a little trickier. Sleep is crucial for writing tests as it keeps your mind functioning at 100%. However, what good is a brain working at 100% if it only knows 60% of the material. Then again, what good is knowing 90% of the material if your brain is only going at 50%. Study early enough and this may be a non issue. But if you are cramming, make sure you think of this before you decide to call it a night / buy your 4 redbulls.
3. Being Social.
The second reason you're at University.
While learning is clearly the implied main goal of continued education, you can’t forget the importance of living some sort of social life. Not only will this teach you important life skills such as dealing with all different types of people, it will also help negate some of the stress imposed on you by your studies. There are millions of different ways to be social, whether it’s just hanging with friends watching TV, joining different types of clubs (I suggest concrete toboggan!), playing sports or going out to the bars/events. Being able to take your mind off the test that may not have gone as smoothly as you’d hoped and doing something else will keep you sane.
4. Personal time.
One of the most underrated uses of your time. Both studying and partying (read: being social) are mentally taxing. Sometimes you just want/need to relax. Do it. Go read a book, watch TV, play some video games, go for a hike.. stumbleupon. Without this, you’ll soon lose any motivation to do any work. Be careful with this one though as it is usually the aspect that creeps in and takes over precious study time.
If you can find the right mix of those 4 things, while still eating properly, the next 4-7 years at Mac will be some of the best years of your life.
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. There are even specified 'math lab' times where you can go on campus and get help with the assignments if you need it.
